


these aliens are GAY and there's nothing you can do about it

by fourshoesfrank



Category: Star Trek
Genre: Multi, also all the characters are autistic bc im autistic, and idk how to write characters who arent, i dont expect people to read this lol, idc about the canon timeline i just picked the year bc the numbers look pretty, literally this is to keep my phones storage down, this is so lackluster lol but read it if u want i guess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-07-20 07:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19988329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: idk.......u know how it is.......u make some characters on star trek online and then they turn into ocs and u have to write something





	1. day one

The class of 2383 was going to have a hard time getting settled in their dorms. Their first day was forecasted to have the heaviest rainstorms of the last forty years, almost heavy enough to justify postponing the freshmen’s first day. Key word: almost. The amount of water falling from the sky only merited precautions, not cancellations. The upperclassmen were all thankful, however, that their school year started a week after the freshmen’s did.

  
Only two students were happy with the weather on their first day. Bir and Frok were both Ferengi, both raised on Ferenginar, so they were used to rain and all the inconveniences that it brought with it. They didn’t talk with each other about this, obviously, because Bir was a female and Frok was decidedly male. He had been raised by traditionalist parents who refused to acknowledge the rights that females had recently aquired. He wouldn’t be caught dead speaking to a female—a _clothed_ female; a female _in uniform_ —like she was his equal. Bir, respectively, wouldn’t be caught dead having a conversation with a male who had the gall to treat her like property.

  
Bir made it to her dorm room without any trouble. It was on the twentieth floor of a building on the northeastern side of campus, high up but not too high, far away from the road but not too far from the lecture halls. The room itself was shaped like a pentagon, with five walls and four windows. The door opened facing the 'point' of the pentagon, in which a bed and a small dresser. Two of the other corners, adjacent to the top of the pentagon, also had beds and dressers. One of the beds was larger than the other two, and there was some writing on the side of it that Bir recognized as the Pakled alphabet. She knew that one of her roommates was going to be a Pakled, so that made sense. 

The room was very bland-looking, with its white walls and navy blue floor. The windows weren't curtained, and their trim was navy as well. The furniture was plain gray, the color of wet cement. Bir knew that the Academy had good reasons for choosing this color palette, she knew that it was to accommodate the wide range of color vision among all the species that were housed in the dorms, but she didn't have to like it. Hopefully all of her roommates could see in color, so Bir could liven up the place a little when she had the opportunity.

The bed in the 'top' of the pentagon was the one Bir chose. Aside from the Pakled writing, the beds and dressers were unmarked, and there were no instructions as to which bed went with which student. Well, first come first serve. That was probably a Rule of Aquisition. Bir wouldn't know, she'd never bothered to memorize them.

She was busy unpacking her small bag of clothes and personal effects when one of her roommates entered.

  
This one must’ve been the Pakled. She was wearing a hoodie with the opening pulled tight around her face to shield herself from the downpour, so Bir couldn’t see if the Pakled cheek ridges were there, but something about her wide-legged stance and heavy body gave it away. Hers was a body built for power, in contrast to Bir’s lithe figure. 

  
The newcomer tugged her hood away from her face and revealed that she did indeed have the characteristic Pakled cheek ridges and tufted eyebrows. She looked around the room until she spotted Bir kneeling on the floor in between her luggage and the her new dresser.

  
“Room 66, twentieth floor?” the Pakled asked, probably checking to make sure she was in the right place. 

  
Bir smiled her best friendly roommate smile and nodded. “Yeah, this is the right room. Kinda weird rooming situation though, right? Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to steal from you or anything. I can get things from people through perfectly legal means.” Her roommate looked a bit overwhelmed, so Bir decided to ease off. She talked too much, but she couldn't help it. “Oh, by the way, I think that bed’s yours,” she added, pointing to the one with the Pakled writing on it. 

  
Bir went back to putting her things away. She didn’t have a lot of non-clothing items in her bag, and what she did have was very important to her. Thirty years ago, she wouldn't even have been allowed to actually own anything at all. She spent several minutes arranging where each object would go inside of or on top of her dresser. While Bir worked, her roommate muttered to herself in Paklese from across the room. Bir frowned for a moment, wondering why the translators weren’t working, before she remembered why. It had been explained during orientation. Unless someone’s biology prevented them from speaking or signing Standard, the translators were turned off inside residential dorm areas to keep the cadets using Standard instead of their native languages. It was supposed to keep the language fresh in everyone's mind. 

  
Bir was all done organizing her space, so she wandered over to chat with the Pakled. Said Pakled was tossing her clothing into her dresser’s drawers, seemingly at random. Bir couldn’t pick out a pattern for what kind of clothing went where. But hey, whatever worked for her roommate was cool.

  
“So, you’re a Pakled,” Bir said, affecting a humorous Tellarite accent. It was the equivalent of saying, “So, you’re from Arkansas,” with an exaggerated Louisiana drawl. Both species were mainly traders, and both were known for being stout and having oddly shaped eyebrows. People often got them confused with the other.

  
The Pakled chuckled. “I’m from Pakled,” she agreed, pausing her unpacking to direct her attention to Bir. “You’re from Ferenginar?”

  
“Yep. Born and raised, unfortunately. You’re going into engineering?” Bir asked, catching sight of the signature yellow on the jacket that the Pakled was holding. She nodded.

  
“Yes. Are you?”

  
“Oh, you bet. Hey, I didn’t catch your name?” Bir snapped her mouth shut after asking, worried that the conversation was moving too fast for the Pakled. She had been told, over and over, that she talked too fast even for species with typical verbal skills. She'd probably have to practice talking slower if she wanted her roommate to like her, or at least tolerate her.

  
Bir's worrying turned out to be unnecessary. “I am Rongau Pimor,” her roommate answered with a big smile. “What’s your name?”

  
“Bir.”

  
Rongalu frowned. “Like the drink?” she asked, making Bir grin. Maybe having a Pakled roommate wasn’t going to be as much of a headache as she’d thought.

  
“No, it’s spelled B-I-R. Actually, my mother was the one who—“

  
Their conversation was interrupted by a knock on the door. Rongalu and Bir both got up to answer it at the same time, but the Pakled ended up being the one to open the door simply because she got there faster. Bir retreated to her own bunk to assess the newcomer.

  
The woman that walked into the room wasn’t of a species that Bir could identify on sight. She had dark green-brown skin, black eyes, and frizzy black hair. Her forehead was ridged, but only faintly, with two ridges above her eyes and a thicker ridge that began on the tip of her nose and ended just before her hairline. Her ears were also ridged, and where the earlobes would’ve been, instead there were long scaled lines. She was wearing a Bajoran earring, so her people must’ve been from around Bajor, but Bir couldn’t place her.

  
“I’m Naovi Taruk,” she introduced herself. Her first name was from someplace vaguely familiar, her last name was unplaceable. She continued, “I guess you’re my roommates. Pleased to meet you.” She didn't sound all that pleased, but tone of voice wasn't a very useful indicator of mood unless the speaker's culture was known to use it that way. There was always the chance that Naovi was having the time of her life and simply didn't use the same cues as mainstream Federation culture to show it.

  
Bir got off her bed and went to greet Naovi. “I'm Bir,” she said, indicating herself with a wave of her hand, “and she's Rongalu Pimor.” The Pakled lifted a hand in greeting and smiled when her name was said.

  
“So you’re the Ferengi, and you’re the Pakled,” the alien mused. “No wonder they stuck me with you guys. Pretty smart.” She didn’t elaborate further, just took her things to the only bed left and began putting them away. She didn’t have much, her bag was even emptier than Bir’s had been.

  
Naovi didn’t seem very sociable, so Bir returned to Rongalu’s space and picked up their conversation where it had left off. They were comparing schedules when an Academy staff member knocked on the door and made sure the three of them were getting settled. It must have been obvious to the staff member that Bir and Rongalu were closer with each other than with their roommate, but the Andorian made no comment on that. They asked for all three of their signatures on a form that said they found the living arrangements acceptable, as well as some kind of contract that had something to do with the room’s environmental controls. Everyone signed, and everyone was happy.

  
“Have you three checked the orientation schedule yet? The Interspecies Relations Committee just added something to tonight’s entry,” the Andorian said as they left the room. All three cadets immediately pulled out their padds and checked. Bir’s face immediately broke into a wry grin.

  
“There’s no way they thought about us when they wrote this,” she laughed. “‘Talk about the similarities between your home planets, and write them down,’ it says. Yeah, they definitely didn’t consider us.”

  
Naovi wrinkled her ridged nose as she read over the notification once more. “I don’t know much about Pakled and Ferenginar, but I know they’re nothing like Bajor or Betazed,” she sighed. Bir and Rongalu exchanged a curious glance. Neither of them had suspected that their roommate had either Betazoid or Bajoran blood. If Bir had been forced to guess, she would’ve gone with Cardassian, or any other reptilian species, possibly even Gorn.

  
“You’re surprised,” the (apparent) telepath noted, and Bir nodded in agreement. Naovi shook her head. “I can’t read you, you’re a Ferengi. I meant you,” she corrected, indicating Rongalu with a pointed finger. “You don’t think in words, so it’s harder, but I get the general idea.”

  
Rongalu held up her padd and raised her eyebrows. It was probably her way of saying they should complete the activity within the scheduled time, or at least in a timely manner. Bir met her eyes again, nodded, and opened a blank document on her own padd. Without any verbal prompting, the three of them gathered around the padd and started discussing their homeworlds.

  
Rongalu went first. “I’m from Pakled. It has mountains, and in between the mountains there’s big rivers and grass. It is beautiful.” She suddenly closed her mouth and glanced over at Bir and Naovi with a look of shame in her eyes. She opened her mouth, closed it, and took a step back, inviting someone else to go.   
Bir shook her head and held out the padd to the Pakled. Rongalu probably didn’t feel confident speaking Standard, or something like that. It was a verbal activity, after all, and Pakleds weren’t known for their verbosity. Naovi didn’t do anything but stand in between the Ferengi and the Pakled as this exchange happened.

  
Rongalu took a deep breath and took the padd from Bir’s outstretched hand. She read over what she’d already dictated, then picked up where she’d left off.

  
“We live in the grass. We take rocks from the mountains and build houses in the grass. Every house is different. Pakleds do not use blueprints.” She paused, thinking. Then, “I never built a house. Some people do not live in their own houses. We travel the mountains and carry rocks instead. Rocks on Pakled are pretty.”

  
This time, when Rongalu offered someone else the chance to speak, she seemed satisfied with what she’d said. Bir made a mental note to look up pictures of common Pakled rocks as soon as she had some free time.

  
Naovi took the padd as it was handed to her and started talking almost immediately. Her speech wasn’t fast, but it was informative, because she used much more complex sentences than Rongalu had used.

  
“I’m not actually from Bajor or Betazed. I’m not part Bajoran, either. Honestly, this earring is just a formality, because I don’t know anything about Bajoran religion. I grew up in an orphanage on the planet where they had a religion class, but I never paid attention. I passed the tests, though, and I got myself an earring for fun.

  
“Bajor as a planet isn’t that remarkable. Lots of farmland, lots of gardens, lots of temples... The whole place runs on plants and priests. It’s got some nice gardens, though, and the grass tastes really good if you eat it with any kind of native fish sauce.

  
“I’m not from Betazed, but I am part Betazoid, so I feel like I have to mention this at least a little. I got sent over there to help control my telepathy, since I developed it before I was a teenager and I guess that's weird, or something. The planet is pretty nice. Lots of islands, plenty temples, y’know.” Bir nodded as if she did know, when in fact she’d never been to Betazed in her life. Naovi continued, “It’s cool. I like the birds that pretty much run amok in every city but the capital, they’re so pretty and they’re such bastards. They remind me of my brother. Ferengi, your turn.”

  
Bir barely caught the padd that was tossed her way before Naovi was even finished speaking. She cleared her throat and checked to make sure the document was still open, which it was.

  
“I’m from Ferenginar, obviously,” she began. She decided not to mention the gender struggle or the suffrage movements currently going on, since the descriptions seemed to be geared more towards wildlife and climate rather than politics. Bir could wax poetic about the rain like nobody’s business.

  
“Did you guys know the Ferengi have over a hundred words for rain? It rains all the time on our planet, but it’s not an ocean world because the ground absorbs the water so fast. Most rich people cities have domes built around them to keep people dry, but if you go out in the country, they don’t have that. A lot of us live in swamps since only a few can afford the rent in the domes.” And females nowadays are kept outside the domes to prevent us from doing business, she added silently. “That’s basically it; rain and swamps,” Bir finished.

  
“Are you thirsty?” Rongalu asked. When two sets of confused eyes looked at her, she added, “Because of the rain.”

  
Bir laughed, then Rongalu joined in, and Naovi chuckled quietly with them.   
These living arrangements would probably work out.


	2. the dining hall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know the imperial measurement system is obsolete in the star trek universe but i wrote this without wifi or a ruler so i couldn’t convert the heights to metric i’m sorry

When Naovi learned that she was going to have to share a room with a Pakled and a Ferengi, she almost threw her padd across the room. She didn’t, because the walls of her quarters on the Bolian transport she was taking were basically made of paper and prayers and she didn’t want to deal with repairs.

  
A Ferengi should have been the last choice for a telepath’s roommate, in Naovi’s opinion. She doubted any telepathic species were involved in the process of deciding who would have to live with whom for the next five-odd years. Any telepath would have known that Ferengis took full advantage of their immunity and tried to ‘surprise’ telepaths with all kinds of annoying business propositions. At least, that was what Naovi’s few friends on Betazed had told her, and she trusted their word.

  
A Pakled wouldn’t be much better. Naovi could read Pakleds, but most of them didn’t think in words, which made it hard to discern what their intentions were. Naovi had only met one Pakled in her life, and the experience hadn’t been that interesting. She wasn’t too excited to share a room with one for about five years. Reading their thoughts was like reading Old Klingon hieroglyphics.

  
And yet, when she walked into Room 66 on the twentieth floor of the northeastern mixed-species dormitory building, the first thing she felt from the Pakled was excitement, and the Ferengi was very polite to her. Maybe this would work out, against all odds.

  
Then she had to describe her homeworld. She didn’t even have one, not really. Bajor was where she’d grown up, but her time there had been spent stuck in an orphanage with a group of Cardassian war orphans. Apparently, Naovi herself had been brought to the orphanage as a baby by a well-meaning old man who had found her abandoned in a crashed shuttlecraft. Quite the dramatic origin story, right? Naovi didn’t care about it; it hadn’t gotten her adopted.

  
The only thing that had gotten her off of Bajor was her telepathy. Naovi couldn’t remember ever being without it, which was unusual. Almost all telepathic species developed their abilities sometime after or during puberty. Not so for Naovi Taruk. She’d actually been good at hiding her telepathy from anyone who might have taken advantage of it. No one had known that she could read their thoughts from as far as half a mile away.

  
She’d slipped up eventually. A human had visited the orphanage and expressed an interest in adopting a son. When Naovi spoke with him, she’d learned that he planned on doing unspeakable things to whichever unlucky boy he adopted. Naovi had told someone what the human planned, and the rest was history. Questions had arisen of why, how, when did she learn this? And the only answer was that she’d read his mind.

  
She was sent off to Betazed for tutoring and therapy, though she wasn’t sure why that was necessary. She was an accomplished telepath, and she was only fourteen years old. Why go through all the trouble of housing and teaching her when she clearly had everything under control?

  
It turned out that she hadn’t had absolutely everything under control. Some DNA tests were administered, and Naovi learned that she was part Betazoid.

  
Half Betazoid, a quarter Betazoid? Nobody could tell exactly how much of her genes were Betazoid and how much weren’t, because her other genes came from such a different species.

  
Cardassian genetics was still an underresearched field when Naovi was tested. The results even indicated traces of Gorn DNA, but there was no way to confirm that particular find. The Betazoid and Cardassian parts of her were confirmed, though.

  
Naovi never talked about this. She let people guess, and sometimes she told them whether their guesses were correct or not, but she never told anyone what two (or more) species had done the horizontal tango in order to bring her into the universe.

  
The funny part was, most people never asked. They thought about it and they wondered, sure, but Naovi could probably count the number of times she’d been verbally asked about her parentage on one hand. Still, she’d gotten in the habit of mentioning the Betazoid part of her whenever she met new people, so they’d stop thinking about it and give her some peace.

  
Naovi’s first night in her Academy dorm room was uneventful. Bir snored, Rongalu daydreamed (but not very loudly, so Naovi only felt a vague memory of running up and down seemingly endless hills) for a solid hour before she fell asleep, and someone across the hall was thinking their horny thoughts way too loudly. Naovi fell asleep at 0130 hours with her pillow over her ears and her blanket kicked onto the floor. She didn’t dream.

  
Waking up was...also uneventful. The Ferengi was the first one up and out of bed, already pulling on her uniform by the time Naovi’s alarm went off. Rongalu had opted for a bed-buzzer instead of a traditional sound-based alarm system, so Naovi couldn’t tell when it went off, but the Pakled was the last one ready in any case. Her morning routine took longer than either Bir’s or Naovi’s.

  
None of them was going to be late to their first breakfast at the Academy, thank goodness. Once everyone had gathered their supplies into their respective backpacks (or comically large pockets, in Rongalu’s case), the three of them were ready to experience their Starfleet Academy classes for the first time.

  
The dining hall was about a ten-minute walk from the pentagon-shaped dormitory. Bir led the way, stepping through the massive puddles left by the last night’s rain like they weren’t even there. Rongalu and Naovi, however, took their time and chose their footsteps carefully, trying to keep their feet as dry as possible. The distance between Bir and her roommates kept growing, while at the same time the distance between the three of them and the dining hall was shrinking, but it wasn’t shrinking nearly fast enough.

  
“Just step into the water, it’s not gonna kill you,” Bir said with a sigh as she strode on through the water like it was nothing. It wasn’t a flood, obviously, but a few puddles were as deep as Naovi’s ankles.

  
“It’s too deep,” she explained. Rongalu nodded from beside her. Bir groaned and threw her arms into the air.

  
“Then walk on the curb.”

  
“The what?”

  
Another groan came from the Ferengi’s throat as she walked back through a puddle to where her two roommates were standing. She pointed to the raised concrete ridge on the edge of the path, which was out of the water. She explained that it was called a curb, and that students were (probably) allowed to walk on it. Naovi and Rongalu shared a bemused glance during the explanation, but they did walk on the curb to avoid getting their feet any wetter than they already were.

  
The dining hall was almost full by the time they got there. The only unoccupied table that Naovi could spot was located under a window on the far side of the room. Rongalu saw it too, and made a beeline to secure it before someone else did. Her two smaller roommates followed closely behind her, taking advantage of the pathway that was being cleared to allow the Pakled to pass through. They reached the empty table without any mishaps and sat down.

  
Naovi rubbed her forehead and winced in pain. The room was full of cadets who were thinking, and feeling, and planning things and having conversations and playing songs over and over in their heads and worrying about what classes would be like and a few were mentally screaming at the lines to move faster and—

  
“Naovi,” Bir said loudly, shaking the telepath’s arm. When Naovi opened her eyes and looked at the Ferengi, she let go, and Naovi thanked every god she’d heard of for that because the touch combined with the thoughts had just been too much.

  
Bir was talking, saying something, and normally Naovi would be able to guess the meaning of her speech even if she couldn’t process the spoken words, but Bir was a Ferengi. Naovi tried to dip into Rongalu’s mind to see what kind of meaning the Pakled was getting from Bir’s words, but all she could read was a vague sense of concern and a huge amount of hunger.

  
“...she can get there faster than us. What do you think?”

  
Naovi had only caught the tail end of Bir’s question, apparently. There was no way she was going to make her roommate repeat herself, so that left just one option. She sighed pulled out her padd, and slid it across the table to the Ferengi.

  
“I can’t understand you,” Naovi told her, “so just write down whatever you just said.” She sat back and waited, picking up a spike of concern from Rongalu while Bir typed on the padd. It didn’t take long, and Naovi had it back in her hands much sooner than she’d thought she would have.

  
_Our plan to get food is replicate it because the premade food is almost gone by now. It will probably be best if we tell Rongalu what we want and she brings it back from the replicator, because she’s bigger than us and more people notice her, so she can get there faster than us. What do you think?_

  
Naovi looked up from the padd and nodded emphatically in agreement with Bir’s idea. She turned to Rongalu and requested a jumja stick and some Earth pancakes with blueberry syrup on them. Bir also said something, probably her own food request, and Rongalu left the table to go replicate the food. Naovi stuck her foot onto the seat of the Pakled’s now-empty chair. When Bir gave her a questioning look, she explained, “It’s to show people that this chair has been claimed, even though no one’s in it right now.” Bir nodded like she understood.

  
They waited in relative silence for their roommate to come back with their food. Bir looked a little uncomfortable, but that was probably due to the same reason that Naovi felt uncomfortable: the place was too loud. Ferengi ears were notoriously sensitive, not just to physical touch but to sounds as well. Together, the two of them could probably hear everything going on in the entire room, both the mental and physical sides of it. Naovi was glad she couldn’t read Bir; the sense of overstimulation that undoubtedly would have assailed her was not appealing in the slightest.

  
As Naovi was thinking about this, three more cadets entered the dining hall and scanned the room for a table that was at least a little open. The only one they could spot was across the room under a window, and a Ferengi and some kind of hybrid were already sitting at it, but there were four open seats. The three newcomers made a beeline for that table, and reached it in record timing. The fact that an extremely tall and buff (six feet five inches, specifically) Bolian led the way certainly helped.

  
Naovi knew that someone wanted to sit down at their table, but she said nothing because she couldn’t tell who exactly had that want. She quickly figured it out when a Bolian, a Trill, and a Tellarite stopped in front of her and asked her something. Bir answered for her, something Naovi was immensely grateful for. The Ferengi must have seemed welcoming, because all three of the new people sent off subtle waves of relief and happiness as they sat down.

  
Bir said something else and pointed to Naovi, who still had no idea what was being said, then Bir pulled out her padd and handed it to the Trill.

  
Said Trill was a thin woman with a buzzcut, dark skin, and light brown eyes; the signature spots that ran along the sides of her face were an intense shade of black and shaped a bit like paint splatters. She was wearing a uniform-regulation skirt that ended at her knees and exposed her legs all the way down to the ankle, and her spots continued down the sides of her skinny legs. They were kind of mesmerizing, like a maze. The Trill’s uniform identified her as a future engineering officer, with the same dark yellow that Bir and Rongalu sported.

  
The Trill handed the padd off to the Tellarite, who began typing slowly. He was pretty short, even for his species; if Naovi had to guess, she would say he wasn’t more than four foot ten. He had the beginnings of an Epic Tellarite Beard (TM) on his chin and upper lip, and the beginnings of an almost Pakled-esque belly on his torso. His hair was long, almost down to his waist, maybe to make up for the short beard. Both his head hair and his beard were dark brown, and his small eyes were the same shade. His skin was only slightly lighter than his hair. The red on the uniform that he was wearing identified him as a tactical cadet.

  
The Bolian man sitting directly across from Naovi was kind of strange-looking. Naovi couldn’t quite put her finger on why, though. He was tall, yes, but that wasn’t strange so much as simply unusual. He was extremely buff in the same way that Rongalu was, with thick muscle covered with a layer of fat, but maybe that was normal Bolian physiology; Naovi didn’t know. He had more muscle than fat anyway, so he wasn't built exactly like a Pakled. His skin was a typical shade of blue, like a blueberry or a really dark part of Earth’s sky, and his features were typical Bolian facial features. Wide nose, small gray eyes, thick lips, cartilage ridge running down the middle...

  
The ridge’s color, and the color of his stripes, was what looked strange. Most Bolians’ stripes were blue, just a little darker in value than the majority of their skin. This man’s stripes were a green-blue color, like a blueish turquoise. Naovi had spent four days on a Bolian transport vessel on her way to Earth, and she had never seen anyone with stripes like his.

  
The Tellarite finished typing and gave the padd to the Bolian, who barely even glanced down at what he was writing while he chatted with Bir and his two friends. When he was done, he slid the padd over to Naovi and gave her a smile and a thumbs-up, no doubt meant as a greeting. Somehow, the thumbs-up gesture had independently developed the same meaning in almost every known alien culture. It was the one hand gesture that pretty much every Federation citizen knew the meaning of. Naovi gave him a small smile in reply and began to read the document.

  
_I’m the Trill. My name is Stiel Giryl and I’m in Engineering. I’m from Earth but I was raised by Trills so I grew up with a mix of both cultures around me. Don’t worry, I try to be nice to everyone. Your friend Bir is really nice. I’m sure you are as well._  
_I am Mattig Laang I am the Tellarite sitting next to Raxx and Stiel. This padd model is hard for me type on but I will do it. I was born on Tellar Prime moved to Vulcan when I was 12 because of my mother’s career. My family is not traditional Tellarite but we do value debate. Even if I cannot debate you because you sometimes cannot talk I think you are cool like the humans say. Do not make bets with Stiel she always wins it is witchcraft._  
_👋 I’m Raxx Triht, the Bolian guy sitting across from you! Bir told us to tell you our names and a little about ourselves and where we’re from. I was born on Risa, but my parents took me back to their home on Pacifica as soon as I was ready. I’m going into the sciences, probably going to specialize in communications. Mattig didn’t write what he’s studying, but he’s going to be a security officer, or something in Tactical if he can’t do that. You seem pretty nice! I look forward to getting to know you and your roommates._

  
Naovi looked up from the padd and nodded to each of the newcomers. Stiel and Mattig simply nodded back, and Raxx gave her another thumbs-up to go along with his nod. They were all engaged in conversation with Bir, who was gesturing animatedly with her hands and talking so fast that Naovi could feel the others getting confused. She dipped into Raxx's mind for a moment to learn what the Ferengi was getting so excited about, since her physical listening skills were still nonexistent because of the loud thoughts around her.

  
Bir was talking about a new type of artificial womb technology, designed to gestate mixed-species fetuses that wouldn't survive to birth if they were kept inside their parent's womb or egg. Raxx, being a future science officer, understood everything that Bir was saying, Stiel understood most of it, and Mattig knew about one third of the jargon that Bir was tossing around.

  
Rongalu came back to the table with two plates in her hands and a bag hanging from one elbow. She set the bag down in front of Bir, gave Naovi her pancakes, and sat down with her own plate of what looked like cooked Pakled vegetables. She greeted the three new people and joined the conversation they were having about the new womb device.

  
Naovi didn’t talk at all during breakfast, but the replicated pancakes and jumja were so unexpectedly good that she wouldn’t have spared time for talking even if she had been capable of it. Still, it would be nice if this didn’t turn into an everyday thing. Naovi would like to know exactly what was going on, rather than having to follow the conversation from the minds of people around her.

  
She would adjust. Once she was used to this level of telepathic input, she would be able to tune it out and listen with her ears rather than her mind.  
The meal was over before any of them knew it. Everyone dispersed from the dining hall almost immediately after the hour changed, remaining only to exchange quick goodbyes and dispose of their dishes.

  
Stiel, Mattig, and Raxx said goodbye to Naovi and her roommates, and promised to meet up again after hours. Rongalu and Naovi left the dining hall to go to their respective classes, but Bir stayed inside to use the bathroom, muttering about replicated worms and too much hew-mon papaya juice extract as she went.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i make Raxx 6’5” just so i can work in a monty python joke eventually?? maybe i did but you can’t prove it


	3. the latecomer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me? worldbuilding? in ways that are barely canon? it's more likely than you think

Raxx and Mattig both went back to their shared dorm room at the same time on the second day of classes. Standing outside the door, facing each other, they exchanged a tired nod and walked into the room together. Raxx’s bed was the one nearest the door, and he collapsed bonelessly into it the second he was through the doorway. Mattig pushed his back against the nearest wall and slid down until he was sitting on the floor, then heaved a big sigh. Raxx followed suit.

  
There had been a series of safety drills earlier that day. It had taken most of the afternoon for the Academy staff members to go over the minute differences in procedure, depending on what exactly was threatening a person’s safety. Most of the scenarios involved energy generator malfunctions, or exobiology specimens getting loose. A lot of the procedures had boiled down to tell someone about the problem, try to get rid of it, and then run like hell. The running was what had tired Raxx and Mattig out so badly.

  
Starting with their class, the class of 2383, all freshmen would be required to participate in some form of physical activity-based extracurricular for at least five months. This had elicited groans and facepalms from some cadets, and fist pumps and clapping in others. Raxx had been in the second group, Mattig had been in the first.

  
“I’m going to be a security officer,” the Tellarite grumbled from his spot on the floor. “Six of the seven classes that I’m taking involve combat training! I think my classmates and I should be exempt from this new rule. It is clearly meant to benefit cadets like yourself, who are not enrolled in enough classes with a physical component to them. What a waste of my time.” Mattig snorted in disgust and stood back up. Raxx watched all of this with half-closed eyes from his bed.

  
“Sucks to be you, I guess.”

  
“That’s true.”

  
“Sorry to hear that. I want to play that human sport, football. I think I heard someone talking about starting an Academy team, so we could play against other teams in the area. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

  
The Tellarite shrugged. “If you are willing to ignore the fact that the game is confusing and many of its maneuvers rely on brute strength rather than the actual skill of the players, then yes, that does sound fun.”

  
Raxx sighed again. He could feel a Tellarite debate coming on, and he had no desire to be involved. Debating with Mattig took concentration and effort, neither of which were coming easily to Raxx at the moment. He just wanted to sleep.

  
“Hey, man, I’m not up for a debate right now,” he said. He already knew that his roommate would grumble about Bolians being too kind and easygoing for their own good, but Raxx would take a lecture on the behavioral failings of his species over an argument about sports any day. He didn’t have to actively participate in someone else’s lecture.

  
Sure enough, Mattig launched into a spiel about Raxx’s people’s obsession with peacefulness and their excessively amiable nature, but Raxx had heard it all before. He tuned out the Tellarite’s impassioned voice, rolled into a comfortable position on his bed, and fell asleep within minutes. He dreamed of swimming in Pacifica’s oceans, his favorite activity back home.

  
Raxx was woken by Stiel entering the room to talk to Mattig. The Trill was extremely heavy-footed for someone who was so thin.

  
“Oh, I’m sorry, did I wake you up?” she asked Raxx when she saw him sit up in his bed. She looked genuinely concerned, which was a pleasant surprise. They’d only known each other for a few days, but Raxx knew by now that Stiel delighted in playing practical jokes on people. Perhaps on Trill, disturbing a friend’s sleep counted as a joke.

  
Raxx was too tired to be angry at the possibility that a joke had been played on him. He shook his head in response to Stiel’s question, because she hadn’t been the only reason he’d woken up. His nap had been just about finished when she came in.

  
He decided to get started on his homework. None of his professors had given Raxx too much work yet, but he didn’t want to fall behind. Diligence was a virtue his parents had drilled into his head practically since birth. And, if he finished all the work early, he would have time to spend with his friends later without the weight of each unfinished assignment hanging over his head.

  
Raxx turned his schoolwork padd on and got to work filling out charts about the different types of radiation. He paid no attention to Stiel and Mattig’s lively debate that was taking place across the room. The charts occupied him completely for the next half of an hour. When he looked up again and brought his mind back from the lecture hall to his dorm room, Stiel had left already. Raxx was a little disappointed that she hadn’t said goodbye to him, but he knew that she had a busy schedule. She’d probably just dropped in for a debate in her free time.

  
Raxx looked over his homework one last time before submitting it to his professor. He smiled to himself; he was now free to go hang out with whoever he wanted to. Or he could stay in his room with Mattig and try to argue about football, but that didn’t really appeal to him at the moment. Bolians weren’t a very argumentative people, as a whole. Raxx had been wondering why the Academy had chosen to place a Tellarite and a Bolian together as roommates; their species weren’t famous for getting along.

  
He remembered the three cadets they’d sat with during breakfast that morning, the Ferengi, the Pakled, and the one who was probably a mix of species. Putting a Ferengi and a Pakled together was strange enough, not to mention throwing someone of a mystery race into the mix as well. And who ever heard of having three people to a room, anyway? Most college-level institutions limited dorm room capacity to two individuals. Maybe it was the shape of the building they were staying in, the pentagon one on the northeastern side of campus.

  
Raxx was just thankful that _he_ wasn’t the one with two roommates of two different species. It didn’t seem like Rongalu, Bir, and Naovi were totally adjusted to living with each other yet. Granted, Raxx and Mattig hadn’t gotten used to each other yet either, but there were only two of them. That three people to a room deal was strange. Maybe the Academy just hadn’t had enough rooms available to stick two people to each one. Maybe they’d been forced to put three people together.

  
Raxx sighed. He should think about this later, when he was bored without a way to fix it. He filed the thought away for later and stood up. Turning to his roommate, he said, “I’m going out to find a Bolian restaurant in the city. Do you want to come?”

  
The Tellarite shook his head. “I should start my homework,” he grunted, “like you just did. Good luck in your search.” He turned his own schoolwork padd on and opened a file.

  
“You’re not gonna debate me in the merits of Tellarite versus Bolian food?” Raxx asked with a grin that was half teasing and half relieved. Mattig shook his head again, clearly focusing more and his work than the conversation.

  
“I will remember that topic for later discussion.”

  
Raxx left the building and headed south, toward the section of the city that was the most brightly lit up. He assumed it was the ‘down town’ area, something he’d heard that most Earth cities had. The buildings were taller and closer together, and the entire area was more commercialized. There wasn’t much room for residential buildings.

  
Pacifica didn’t have enough landmass to allow for this kind of city planning. The planet was covered in tiny islands, each one not more than fifteen kilometers across. There were only two islands tall enough to be considered mountains; the rest were relatively flat and close to sea level. When all the available space to live above-water had been taken, the native Pacificans had begun building floating dwellings that were anchored to the shore with thick ropes. They weren’t boats, they were floating houses. And when the idea of floating houses had become boring, the Pacificans had constructed underwater cities.   
These cities were planned down to the very last detail. Everything was evenly spaced, and the important buildings were deeper than the others, not taller. It was a sharp contrast to Earth’s ‘down town’ areas. Raxx grew up in a floating house, but he spent enough time in the underwater cities to be baffled by the amount of landmass that Earth cities occupied. It seemed wasteful.

  
He passed several alien restaurants. There was a Klingon drive-thru, and a Ferengi bar, and an endless variety of multicultural food trucks. Raxx wanted Bolian food, though, so he was looking for a Bolian restaurant. Replicated food just wouldn’t cut it.

  
Raxx spotted what he was looking for. A Bolian fast food place called the Blue Lemon was just down the street from him. He quickened his pace and smiled to himself as he reached the entrance. Even from the outside, it smelled like his parents’ kitchen.

  
The inside of the restaurant was brightly lit, and there was nothing covering any of the windows. Sunlight was important to Raxx’s people. Their homeworld’s skies were often filled with storm clouds that blocked out the sun, so Bolian architects designed their buildings to allow as much natural light into each room as possible. Raxx hadn’t grown up on the Bolian homeworld, but he’d been raised by Bolian parents. He knew his culture well.

  
He ordered a seafood wrap at the counter. Bolian seafood was always extremely spicy, because the native fishes on Bolarus IX were extremely bland. Raxx liked seafood the best, probably because he’d grown up on an ocean world. Ordering seafood was also a habit, because it was hard to get anything else for a decent price on Pacifica.

  
Raxx didn’t wait long for his wrap. The cashier handed it to him with a smile and watched as he took a small bite, and then a larger one. It was good. He gave her a thumbs-up and left the Blue Lemon with his food in his hand. He figured he might as well take a look around the down town of San Francisco, see what else Earth had to offer. He also wanted to familiarize himself with the way that large, above-ground cities were laid out, although that was assuming humans even had a standard metropolitan city blueprint. They weren’t known for their planning abilities.   
He was barely two blocks away from the fast food place when a tall alien woman clutching a suitcase ran up to him, shouting in a language he didn’t know.

  
For a moment, Raxx was too busy looking at her in surprise to do anything in response. She was a unique sight, even after a full day of seeing countless other species in his classes. He’d never seen anyone that looked like this woman. It was impossible to tell what species she was; Raxx couldn’t even hazard a guess.

  
Her skin was mostly a light shade of olive green, but there were navy blue splotches all over her body, without any apparent pattern to them. They resembled vitiligo, the pigmentation condition that some humanoids had. She was colorful, that was for sure. And the color didn’t stop at her skin. Her curly hair was light purple, the color of the lilac flowers from Earth that everyone liked so much. It was long, almost down to her knees, a sharp contrast to Raxx’s own bald head. Even her eyeballs were mini explosions of color. The left one, with a yellow iris and no pupil to speak of, looked like it was her biological eye, but the right one was definitely technological. It wasn’t positioned in line with the other; instead, her right eye was located high up on her forehead. It was also a bright, electric shade of blue, and faintly glowing.

  
This woman was truly a sight to behold. Or a sight to hear, because she was still shouting.

  
Raxx was sure she was yelling at him, and not anyone else, because he recognized the word _Starfleet_ somewhere in the barrage of words being flung at him. Nobody else around was wearing an Academy uniform.

  
It would be a good idea to calm her down. “Ma’am,” Raxx said in Standard, “can I help you?”

  
She stopped yelling. Her rapid-fire speech lowered in volume, but it was still in a language that Raxx didn’t know. He shrugged and asked her, “Do you speak Standard, ma’am?”

  
A look of realization dawned on her face. She nodded emphatically. “Yes, I do,” she said. Her Standard was good enough to understand, but her heavy accent made it likely that she had just recently learned the language. She pointed to the insignia on Raxx’s Academy uniform. “You’re in Starfleet? Where is the Starfleet Academy?”

  
Oh, she must have been one of the latecomers. Every year, apparently, a bunch of cadets arrived a few days late. It was mostly because of transport delays.

  
“I’m only a cadet, ma’am. I’m not in Starfleet yet. I can walk you to the Academy, if you’d like.”

  
“Yes!” she exclaimed. “I have all the information they will need. Where’s the place I take it?”

  
The Administration Office was a ten minute walk from San Francisco’s down town. Raxx escorted the woman, whose name he learned was T’Vayshkssassi, to the office without incident. When the administrative assistant they had talked to handed her room card over, Raxx knew exactly who she was going to share a room with. T’Vayshkssassi’s room assignment was the same as Stiel’s. No wonder Stiel didn’t have a roommate yet; it was because she was sharing with a latecomer.

  
“Hey, my friend’s gonna share a room with you! That’s great, she’s really great,” Raxx said enthusiastically. “Come on, I’ll walk you there. You’re gonna be in the pentagon-shaped building on the northeast side of campus. It’s not that far.”

  
“Thank you.”

  
T’Vayshkssassi made a sweeping motion with her arm toward the exit, inviting Raxx to lead the way. He smiled at her and began walking toward the pentagon building.

  
They discussed T’Vayshkssassi’s journey on the way to her room. She’d taken a shuttle from her home on Vulcan to a waiting Bolian transport, and from there the ship had begun its trip to Earth. Halfway through the voyage, the warp drive had failed, forcing the transport to use only impulse power. Needless to say, the trip had taken much longer than anticipated.

  
“Well, I hope the crew of the transport was good to you,” Raxx said. “I’d hate for you to wind up with a bad impression of Bolians up there, and wind up dealing with me down here,” he chuckled. V’Vayshkssassi laughed with him. Her biological eye squinted nearly shut when she laughed, Raxx noted. It was cute. She was cute, even if she looked unusual. Heck, she was cute partially because of her looks. Raxx was no stranger to being thought of as the weird looking one. He decided to make a concerted effort to make friends with this woman, who was apparently from Vulcan but showed her emotions so freely.

  
“Here we are,” Raxx said. They were standing outside the pentagon dorm building, right in front of the doors. He made a sweeping gesture with his arm towards the entrance, echoing the motion she’d made when she invited him to walk with her. T’Vayshkssassi thanked Raxx for all his help, and entered the building.

  
Raxx turned around and headed to his own dorm building. It was a more conventional shape than T’Vayshkssassi’s, a plain rectangle, but the outside was covered in murals. The pentagon dorm’s walls weren’t painted at all, because they were sided with a metal that paint didn't stick to. The inside was reportedly quite nice, though.

  
Raxx entered his and Mattig’s room with the intention of convincing his roommate to go out someplace, but when he saw that Stiel was inside again, his desire to leave the room vanished. The Trill was playing a game of two dimensional chess with Mattig, and it looked like she was winning. Raxx wanted to stick around for the game’s resolution, and for the Tellarite’s indignation when he lost. It was a forgone conclusion that Stiel would win; she was just too good. Raxx had found that out the hard way.

  
“Hello,” Mattig greeted his roommate as Raxx sat cross-legged on his bed across the room. The Bolian returned the greeting and said hi to Stiel as well.

  
She grinned and said, “You’re just in time to see me beat him.” Raxx laughed and waited for Stiel to call checkmate. It wouldn’t take long. She had an excellent sense of timing.

  
“Checkmate,” she said triumphantly, snatching Mattig’s king off the board and holding it over his head while he facepalmed. She giggled when he tried to grab it out of her hand; she was an entire foot taller than him and her limbs were much longer.

  
Raxx, also laughing, got off of his bed and joined the two of them at the small table in the center of the room. There were four chairs, one on each side, but the two that weren’t being used had been folded up and placed in a corner where no one would trip on them. Raxx was content to stand.

  
He waited until Stiel was done celebrating before he said, “Your roommate is on campus now.”

  
The Trill almost dropped Mattig’s king piece in surprise. Her eyes grew comically wide, and her mouth hung open while she struggled to find a response. Her eyebrows shot up to her forehead as she asked, “What’s she like?”

  
Raxx shrugged. “She’s nice. I can’t tell what species she is, but she’s nice. Don’t prank her,” he warned Stiel, who didn’t appear to be listening. She was gathering her two padds up from the table and saying something to Mattig about a rematch, not even sparing Raxx a glance as she exited the room. Before a minute had passed, she was gone without any sort of farewell.

  
Mattig made an amused grunting sound as he started picking up the chess pieces and putting them back where they belonged. “I am sure we’ll hear all about her roommate tomorrow,” he predicted. Raxx nodded in agreement.

  
“She really is nice, though. I wasn’t saying that just to make Stiel happy. T’Vayshkssassi seems cool.”

  
“What kind of name is that? Where is she from?”

  
“She said she's from Vulcan, but she shows her emotions and she has such a thick accent that she couldn’t have learned Standard in school like they do there,” Raxx said. He sighed and resigned himself to not knowing the specifics of T’Vashkssassi’s life just yet. With any luck, she would come with Stiel to breakfast and they could all talk with her.

  
“Hmm,” Mattig grunted, “Maybe she will tell you about herself when you see her next.”

  
“Yeah, I hope so.”

**Author's Note:**

> if you bothered to read this good for you........maybe comment but i dont really care about that on this one


End file.
